Logging
Ban In Thailand
Program
Area
This activity
is designed for a Grade 10 Geography of Eurasia class. It would
best fit into the unit of study on Thailand's economy and natural
resources.
Learning
Outcomes
Teaching,
learning and evaluation will focus on the student's ability to:
Understand the impact of logging on mountain villages of Thailand;
Understand the reason for a ban on logging in Thailand.; Recognize
the power environmental groups have in enacting government legislation.
Classroom
Development
- Have
your students find Thailand in their atlas. Discuss the impact
on the residents of the varying topography. Ask your students:
Why would forestry be important to this economy?
- Have
your students read the article Thailand Imposes Logging Ban,
then have them answer the following questions:
Questions
- What
is the significance of Prime Minister Choonhaven's ban on logging
in Thailand?
- Describe
the three types of public pressure for the ban.
- How had
forest cover been altered since 1961?
- Describe
the conflict of interest in Thailand's forests between multinational
corporations and local native peoples.
- How might
reforestation programs with eucalyptus trees cause problems
for the local ecology?
- Is this
logging ban a good idea? Explain your answer.
- Will
other Pacific countries need to deal with logging companies
in the future? Explain.
Timing
- 10 min
for Thailand map discussions
- 30 min
for the questions from the article
- 15 min
to take up the questions and discuss the issue
Resources:
periodicals on Thailand; topics: books on forestry in South Pacific
rim countries.
Cross-disciplinary
Links:
A science
class could examine the role of forests in holding soil and moisture
within an ecosystem and their role in the maintenance of biodiversity.
Thailand
Imposes Logging Ban
Thailand's
total ban on logging, probably the first of its kind in the world,
has been hailed as a major environmental victory. But multinational
companies planing to patent forest products and to set up industrial
plantations may pose new threats to the natural forest.
The forest
conservation movement in Thailand, which has been growing steadily
in the last few years, achieved its most striking success so far
on 10 January 1989 with the approval by the Cabinet of Prime Minister
Chatichai Choonhavan of a nationwide logging ban, possibly the
first of its kind in the world.
The ban
was the result of public pressure of three types. The first consisted
of increasingly strident protests from rural villagers, particularly
in the hilly north of the country, against timber companies' destruction
of catchment areas and traditional irrigation systems crucial
for agricultural subsistence.
The second
was a campaign among conservationists and others against a 1988
Judicial Council ruling that unexpectedly reactivated logging
concession agreements in some of the county's most important wildlife
sanctuaries and other protected areas.
The third
(and most decisive politically) derived from the widespread public
shock and outrage at deforestation related mudslides in South
Thailand in November 1988 which took the lives of hundreds and
buried villages and farmland under metres of logs, uprooted trees
and sand.
With the
effects of decades of commercial forest exploitation increasingly
threatening the well-being of the rural majority, historical conditions
were ripe for the growth of a grassroots movement powerful enough
to force the government into defying the politically well-connected
logging interests.
By 1988,
with forest cover down to 18 per cent of the land area from 53
percent in 1961, the connections between deforestation and erosion,
floods and drought had become very clear to everyone. There was
thus perhaps more potential for the growth of environmental politics
than in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia or Brazil, where
tree cover remains more extensive and the consequences of large-scale
deforestation are less a matter of everyday experience for the
population as a whole.
The Thai
ban is not without loopholes which will facilitate a certain amount
of cheating by timber firms for another year or so. And perfect
enforcement will not be easy. Nevertheless, it will be difficult
by and large for logging companies to get around the ban, or to
make exaggerated demands for compensation.
Part of
this is due to the specificity of the clauses of the laws themselves,
some of which were modeled directly on suggestions by environmentalists.
One clause, for example, requires timber companies wishing to
remove logs remaining in the forest to prove that they were legally
felled prior to the ban; another voids preexisting concessions
in any forest gazetted as a wildlife sanctuary.
More important,
however, will be the vigilance of the public and press, which
will now have a green light to agitate against surreptitious activities
of commercial loggers. Parliamentarians, army officers and other
bureaucrats, for their part, will be reluctant in the foreseeable
future to risk their political careers by trying openly to overturn
the popular ban.
The victory
over commercial logging is rapidly helping to bring other environmental
issues to the fore. Since the momentum began building to stop
domestic logging, Thai businessmen and bureaucrats have been vigorously
seeking new sources of timber to the country's thousands of sawmills
from Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even the
Ivory Coast.
The challenge
to Thai environmentalists is to suggest ways of reducing demand
for tropical timber at home and to offer renewed support for forest
conservation attempts abroad, in order to ensure that Thailand's
forest problems are not simply imported elsewhere.
Another
challenge is posed by the incipient attempt of farsighted multinational
corporations and their allies in international organizations to
take more of a hand in the conservation of protected areas.
Taking advantage
of the current climate of concern for tropical nature, many companies
are mapping out ways of getting a lock on endangered genetic raw
material in primary forests (as well as the knowledge of forest
natives about its uses), so that it can one day be turned into
patented agribusiness, pharmaceutical or biotechnological commodities.
Ambitious
"biodiversity preservation" plans are being drawn up
for Thai and other Southeast Asian forests which will bring together
bodies such as the World Resources Institute, Weyer-hauser, European
pharmaceutical companies, the Food and Agriculture Organization,
the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research,
the United States Agency for International Development (USAID),
World Wide Fund for Nature, and various national governments.
Some grassroots
oriented environmental campaigners see risks both to democracy
and to nature in allowing such organizations to take control of
forests away form the local peoples who have the most interest
in preserving them.
Environmental
groups are also concerned about the taking over of community land
by industrial wood companies. Now that logging is officially "out"
and reforestation "in" in Thailand, both domestic and
multinational corporations are rushing to plant fast-growing Australian
eucalyptus varieties on whatever land they can rent or buy.
Their hope
is to make large profits of paper-pulp or wood-chip exports. In
this they have the blessing of a government eager for foreign
exchange and well aware that it itself doesn't have the resources
to reforest the country. Thai villagers and environmentalists
as a whole agree with the goal of reforestation, but want to know
reforestation by whom, with what and where?
Renting
so-called ":degraded" government forests to private
firms for capital-intensive eucalyptus operations tends to push
squatters previously resident on the land to encroach on forest
frontiers elsewhere just as resettlement schemes are doing in
Brazil and Indonesia.
Without
serious attempts a land reform, environmentalist warn, commercial
"reforestation" often only accelerates deforestation.
Many squatters are suggesting that they be allowed to keep their
land, planting fruit or rubber trees on it for their own benefit
and preserving nearby patches of natural forest for the good of
the community.
Noting
that eucalyptus plantations provide few of the benefits rural
Thais are accustomed to getting from their varied local forests
(including fodder, firewood, mushrooms, game and red ant eggs
for protein, herbal medicines and resins), they point out that
they tend to hog local groundwater and spoil the soil for other
crops and trees as well.
Environmentalists
add that in practice, large-scale eucalyptus growers and contractors
tend to promote eucalyptus on large tracts of land which necessarily
include patches of either natural forest or relatively fertile
land better suited to more conventional crops and orchards.
So far,
resistance to commercial reforestation with eucalyptus is confined
mainly to environmentalists and villagers who have direct experience
of it, particularly in seven or eight provinces in the north east
of the country. Given the current political climate and the deep-rooted
conflicts over resource use involved, however, the movement has
the potential of spreading more quickly than previously anticipated.
Larry Lohmann.
Development and Cooperation. No. 3, 1989.
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